


Survival Skills 101

by AuditoryCheesecake



Series: A Cheesecake's Tumblr Shorts [27]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dorian Pavus is Not The Best Teacher, Found Family, Gen, Necromancy, Old Marrieds Adoribull, Post-Trespasser, Zombie Nug, temporary animal death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 18:31:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9250409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuditoryCheesecake/pseuds/AuditoryCheesecake
Summary: Emeline came to Dorian Pavus for teaching. She got a little more than she bargained for.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is an [old ficlet](http://acheesecakewrites.tumblr.com/post/147541289033/im-sure-you-have-seen-that-post-by-justjasper) that never got posted to Ao3, _plus_ a coda requested by KT on Patreon!  <3

Necromancy isn’t the most “heroic” of schools, Emeline knows. Bad enough that she’s a mage, but no Champion, no Hero, is a necromancer too. Not in Orlais, not in our Circle, not in our home, under our roof, in our family, and so on. She’s numb to that now.

But the Circle doesn’t have many corpses, or teachers for the sorts of things she wants to learn, so she goes looking. There’s a certain rumor she finds, and she follows it into the rolling green valleys at the western edge of the Orlesian heartlands.

Now, rumors about a mysterious necromancer living an isolated life away from others are bound to be overblown, frightening on purpose. Of course he’s a foreigner, and a retired Magister to boot. (Since when did Magisters live long enough to retire?) Of course he has an equally intimidating companion, of course great personages like the Inquisitor and Divine Victoria pay him visits and perhaps heed his counsel. It’s more than just knowledge Emeline wants to learn from him. It’s power too. Not that she tells anyone that. Mages aren’t supposed to _want_ to be powerful.

There’s nothing about the rumors that can prepare her for what she finds. She expects either darkness or opulence, a necromancer or a noble. A marble villa, a convenient graveyard, an imposing iron gate, a _guard_.

But the innkeeper in the cheerful hamlet of Lumeau points her down a lane at the northern edge of town, winding and marked with wagon-tracks. Apple trees in the final bloom before the heat of summer line either side, creating an avenue of sweet-smelling shade. On horseback, this final leg of the journey is swift.

There is no sprawling mansion like the house her father owns, just a cottage nestled against a rising hill, simple, and rather small, considering it’s supposed to house two heroes of the Inquisition. Surely they could have bought four townhouses in Val Royeaux with the wealth they must control.

There is a garden, full of bushes of berries and magical herbs. A small plot of vegetables at the eastern edge, beside a pond large enough for fish. Flowers of the decorative sort crowd along the fence in rows more quaint than dignified. The fence itself is chest-height when she dismounts, built from simple wooden rails, weathered instead of whitewashed. The gate is wide enough for two horses abreast, and just as sweetly, jarringly plain as everything else. Of course, each rail in the fence and gate is overlaid with protective runes and enough traps to ward off an army. They are tightly woven and sophisticated, and Emeline stops to admire them before she presses a cautious hand to the latch.

She doesn’t lift it, because she sees the Tal Vashoth for the first time– the rumors and the stories all say he’s Tal Vashoth and not Vashoth, and Emeline knows that the distinction matters. He was a warrior in his prime at the advent of the Inquisition, fearsome already, and famed. She’s seen the portrait of him that hangs in the grand great hall in Skyhold, when she went traveling with her aunt, but it pales in comparison to the real thing.

He’s taller than any of the Vashoth she’s met to date, and she’d thought that the portraitist must have exaggerated the breadth of his arms or chest or horns or– something, but the Iron Bull is beyond hyperbole. He simply _is_.

He stands slowly from where he was kneeling among the rows of flowers, and makes his way towards her with the aid of a cane. Dawnstone, she sees, as he comes closer. For all that he’s old– perhaps older than her father– his single eye is bright and quick. He takes her measure in a glance, Emeline can tell.

“We didn’t know to expect a visitor,” he says, and Emeline scrambles in her bag for the letter of introduction that First Enchanter Edmonde had written. “Dorian will be annoyed he’s not more dressed up.”

She hands him the letter and watches anxiously as he breaks the seal. He makes a show of examining the wax for tampering, and Emeline grows more nervous by the second as he raises a monocle to his eye and reads slowly, looking back and forth between her and the paper.

“You’re his companion,” Emeline says cautiously. “The Iron Bull.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days.” He hands her letter back and chuckles. “We’re behind the times then, saying “husband”? Dorian’ll be disappointed that we’re so unfashionable.”

“Non, I mean… there are many rumors, in the University, in Val Royeaux.” She holds the letter in both hands, careful not to bend it as the Iron Bull leads her up the garden path. “I simply didn’t wish to presume.”

 

Ser Pavus is in his study, which looks out over still more gardens in the back of the house. They must be a riot of color in the summer, Emeline thinks, and of bees. She’s always preferred something more understated, but it’s not her place to criticize.

He looks up when they enter, light from a myriad of whisps glancing off the thin wire rims of his spectacles. The study is a scholar’s haven, the walls lined with books and a huge, beautifully detailed map of Thedas. The oceans are painted with ultramarine and the borders edged with gold. It must have cost a fortune, more than the globe below it with the constellations sketched in silvery ink.

One of the whisps floats over to investigate Emeline, and another curls across the Iron Bull’s shoulder like a cat. The magic charge in the room sets her teeth on edge and her nerves buzzing. It’s powerful, and casual, and it’s everything she wants to be.

“This is Emeline,” The Iron Bull says, and Ser Pavus sighs.

“Amatus, I don’t really have to deal with another–”

“She’s not an assassin, Kadan.” His heavy hand lands on her shoulder, making her startle even as he guides her forward. “Give him the letter, Emeline.”

Ser Pavus takes it with a sardonic roll of his eyes. “Or someone’s caught on that you’re soft for pretty faces and touching stories.” He doesn’t seem too concerned, though, and looks over her letter as carefully as The Iron Bull had.

“I was hoping you’d take me as an apprentice,” Emeline begins. “I can cook some, and clean, take care of your animals– I could learn to garden, even. Just let me read your books and takes notes, you don’t even have to pay for my board, my father will–”

“Take a breath, my dear.” Ser Pavus smiles at her over his spectacles, crystal and gold wire, very fine. The gold matches the small ring in his nose, contrasts with the silver streaks in his hair. “Thrown out of your Circle, were you? Bit of a trouble-maker?”

“Ambitious.” Better to be upfront, she figures.

“Oh ho!” Ser Pavus stands with slow dignity and circles his desk, coming face to face with Emeline. He’s perhaps two handspans taller than she is, surprisingly broad for a mage. A thin scar bisects one eyebrow, cutting up towards his hairline. It’s an old wound, well healed, but it must have been worrisome at the time. It pulls his expression just slightly lopsided when he raises his brows. He looks her up and down. “And I’m the one to aid your in your rise to power?”

“I went to Nevarra, to learn from the Mortalitasi, but they said you were the best.”

Flattery works on him, since he hides a smile under the guise of smoothing his mustache. Another whisp slides up Emeline’s arm. There are nearly ten in the room, all glowing brightly even in the afternoon sun. Emeline’s only ever been able to summon two at a time.

Ser Pavus taps his pen thoughtfully on his desk. “Care for the animals, you say.”

“Kadan,” The Iron Bull admonishes, but Emeline would muck the stables for a year if it got her the chance to read one book from these shelves.

 

They set her up in a small room at the top of the house– far from theirs, she heard The Iron Bull murmur to Ser Pavus in Tevene, they must not think she knew the language– and introduce her to the small staff who keep the fire burning in the hearth and clean Ser Pavus’s huge windows.

She is given charge of the animals, though it’s easy, since the Iron Bull helps her. He is… jovial, not at all like the somber veterans who guard the University in place of Templars. The Iron Bull laughs quickly but kindly, when Emeline is wary of the red dracolisk in the last stall and when she gets knocked over by the goats in the back garden.

There are indoor animals as well: a cat which is constantly dozing, either in front of the fire or on Emeline’s pillow, and Ser Dorian’s small cadre of reanimated animals. Of those she counts another cat, which prowls the rooftops and disdains petting, a runty deepstalker which keeps to the back of the library (and what a library!) and two budgies in an ornate cage that coo happily at each other and anyone who comes near, especially Ser Dorian and The Iron Bull. She covets all of them desperately, not least because of the magical strength they represent.

 

The Iron Bull trains her in combat, which wasn’t something most mages of her family’s class are well versed in. Mental battle is one thing, exerting your will over a demon, but she’s never had occasion to swing her staff as a blunt weapon or block the cut of a sword.

“Training the body is equally as important as training the mind,” Ser Dorian calls from his seat at the edge of the sparring ring, sipping wine and not reading a book. One day, Emeline will knock that smirk off his face, but she has to be able to go toe-to-toe with The Iron Bull for at least a full minute before she can do it.

Ser Pavus is a good teacher, she writes to her father, patient, intelligent. He hasn’t actually started on the necromancy yet, but two months isn’t that long a time for him to take in assessment. He’s rightfully protective of his secrets.

She has free range of his library, and permission to examine the animals as closely as they themselves will let her, and she wonders sometimes if it’s a first test that he’s set without telling her. It would be like him, to have some secret and arbitrary lesson that she has to learn on her own before her education really begins. Patience, maybe. Or how he’s layered all these preservation spells over the budgies so not even a feather has begun to decay.

 

The hours just before midnight have become Emeline’s favorite time of day. Her mornings are solitary, and she hasn’t seen Ser Dorian awake before noon even once. Her lunch is usually an apple while she’s tucked away among the books, or working in the garden with the Iron Bull. Supper is informal, often with guests– she got to write to her brothers about meeting a mercenary company, and won’t they be jealous– but just as often she takes herself off to the village and lets them have the house to themselves.

But at night the three of them (and sometimes Cremisius or Sera and once the _Viscount of Kirkwall_ ) break out the wine, and that’s when Emeline gets to learn.

She came to Dorian Pavus not just because of his magic, but because he’s a mage from Tevinter who regardless of his origin is counted among the heroes of his generation. He helped to save the world, and Emeline doesn’t wish for another cataclysm, but what sort of aspiring hero would she be if she didn’t at least _try_ to learn from him?

She’d certainly have fewer stories about dragon hunting, and every hero needs to know how to deal with dragons.

She trades stories about her time at the University of Orlais for Ser Dorian’s tales of the Minrathous Circle. The Iron Bull asks about her family, both growing up and news from the letters her brothers send weekly. When he learns that they call her Emmy, he starts to as well.

 

She fetches books and meals for Ser Dorian when he’s in his study, and carries his materials when they make excursions. Most often they go to Lumeau, to sit in the tavern there. The Iron Bull gathers news from passing travelers, and Ser Dorian sets himself and Emeline at a corner table. They proceed to do what Emeline can only describe as “hedgewitchery.” Ser Dorian doesn’t read fortunes, but after seeing him hand out tinctures of elfroot to an arthritic farmer and listen for a baby’s heartbeat, she wouldn’t have been entirely shocked to see him produce a deck of tarot cards or carved bone runes.

They leave the inn after midnight, Emeline staggering a little under the gifts and bartered payments Ser Dorian had collected. 

“Everyone says that magic should serve man,” Ser Dorian says as they walk slowly up the lane. “Here in the south, that translated in to subjugation and exploitation, while in the north it meant serving one’s own personal ends. There are more moderate interpretations these day, which I am glad of.”

“You use your magic as a service for others.” She’s not particularly interested in a lesson in humility, but sometimes one topic will feed into another. Ser Dorian is an exceptionally good talker.

“I consider myself on a level with a master carpenter. I have a skill, and I sell it here. My payment comes in goods and returned favors,” he gestures to her basket of bread, eggs, and preserves from a pair of grateful farmers, “in friendship and safety. That is all I require of it lately. You, on the other hand, would like to rise higher than the place I’ve landed.”

“Yes,” she agrees, a little wary.

“If I were to say that I don’t plan on teaching you any necromancy, that your position, were you to stay, would be as a glorified research assistant in my historical endeavors, and not as a student of magic, what would your response be?”

“I would be disappointed. Very disappointed, but I can hardly force you to teach me.”

The only noises in the night are their footsteps and the tapping of The Iron Bull’s cane.

“And if I were to teach you everything I know, call in favors with my contacts across Thedas and train you into a necromancer nearly as powerful as myself, what would you do with that? Would you sally forth and conquer the world with undead hordes? Would you conjure illusions in an opera house before the Imperial court?”

“I would go home, first, to see my brothers again and show my father he can be proud of a mage.”

They walk a little further.

“I might cast a few illusions while I travel,” Emeline says, “to finance the trip.”

“You know,” Ser Dorian says, “your father’s opinion is not the only one of value. But he’s certainly a fool if he can’t see–”

“I’d come back to visit you, of course, if you wanted–” Emeline talks over him by accident.

The Iron Bull mutters something that sounds like “mages” and stops short. Emeline and Ser Dorian turn to look at him. “Emmy,” he says, and drops a heavy hand on her shoulder, “what Dorian’s trying to say is he wants you to stick around. Research, student, family, the lot.”

She hears Ser Dorian fidgeting anxiously, so she doesn’t look at him. She looks at The Iron Bull’s arm, instead. The hand not on her shoulder is on Dorian’s.

“And Kadan, I don’t think you need to worry about her disappearing and never writing. She still hasn’t figured out how old the budgies are, and I don’t think she’s leaving until she does. Are you, Emmy?”

“No.” Dorian smiles back when she finally looks at him. “I’ve learned quite a lot here, but I was hoping you would teach me that.”

* * *

Emeline stands in the center of Dorian’s laboratory with her hands on her hips. Victor, deadly mouser, unrepentant vandal, reanimated feline, flicks his ears at her, unconcerned. The corpse of a small nug lies on top of her notes.

“Is this your idea of a gift?” she asks him. His tail flips against the side of the desk. “You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you? Killing my experiment.”

They stare at each other across the lab. Her desk is on a raised platform in the back of the room, he’s sitting atop her stack of books on herbalism. She’s just come through the door, but she knows his game.

Emeline takes a step forward, and Victor hops off the desk, vanishing through the open window in the wall above it. She sighs and goes to close it. Her shoes tap on the sterile white floor.

From a closet she takes out two coats and two pairs of thin leather gloves, all freshly laundered and charmed to repel any magical mishaps. She dons her own set and leaves the others on Dorian’s chair. He’ll get there soon enough, she knows, but one time he was in such a hurry to check on the dragonthorn dissolution that he forgot the gloves and nearly seared his fingerprints off. She does worry about him sometimes.

She spends more time in the lab than he does, lately. It’s a discrete building at the back of the garden, heavily warded and spelled at all times. She’d thought it was a toolshed the first few times she’d bothered to glance at it, but now it’s her second favorite place in their little corner of Orlais. First is, and will always be, the library here. It takes up most of the second floor of Dorian and Bull’s little house, and they’ve managed to cram nearly as many books in there as are kept in the petit salon de libre in Emaline’s first Circle. Seeing as she’d chosen to go there because of the wealth of academic knowledge inside the walls, it was a formidable accomplishment.

The nug is a specimen from the woods, and catching it the first time had been its own lesson-- woodscraft, specifically, with some of Bull’s old company. Emeline had failed that test miserably. She’d learned the game trails, set the snare… and been unable to kill the squirmy little thing. Skinner had thrown up her hands and stalked away, muttering under her breath. Dorian had decided that the nug would factor into _his_ lessons.

“The thing about necromancy-- real, lasting reanimation,” he’d finally said, three years after she came to him for teaching, “is that you have to _want_ the thing to be alive.”

Emeline had nodded and glared fiercely at Dalish, who was the only other person there and therefore a stand-in for anyone who wanted to hurt the nug.

“It _is_ important to be able to hunt for yourself,” Dalish said placatingly. “Think of it as self defense! Defending against starving to death.”

“I can hunt edible mushrooms,” Emeline muttered, “I know what those look like and I don’t have to kill them.”

“Name it mushroom then,” Dalish said brightly. “Problem solved.”

The name, despite Emeline’s protests, had stuck. Champignon was integrated into the household, and given a bed near her desk in the laboratory. A crate that had arrived full of books and glass vials from Serault was repurposed into a little cave for him to hide in. He liked to be picked up and would sit on her shoulders when her hands were full.

This is his third death. Two now were death by Victor, once by eating crushed deathroot-- that had been an unpleasant lesson in labeling and laboratory procedures. 

The older Champignon gets, the harder it is to coax his spirit back into his body. Eventually, Emeline knows, she’ll have to start practicing the containment and conservation spells that Dorian’s worked into his animals.

She sighs and picks up the little nug, focusing her magic on the wounds that Victor left. She works more quickly than last time, more familiar with the anatomy and muscles and veins. With the injury mended, she reaches out and finds his spirit wandering among the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling.

He’s reluctant at first. She could order him, of course. Overpower his small rodent will with her own. But she treats him how she does when his consciousness is still in his body: she strokes behind his ears and pulls out a few dawn lotus seeds, his favorite treat. Ethereal whiskers twitching, Champignon investigates her offering.

She murmurs nonsense to him in Orlesian, rhymes her mother sang when she was scared, and gently binds his spirit back into himself.

It’s not an entirely dispassionate affair. When Champignon finally squeaks and twitches his mortal nose, Emeline presses her face into his soft side. He snuffles curiously at her hair.

“Well done.” She turns, Champignon clutched to her chest. Dorian’s standing in the doorway, arms folded.

He’s not stingy with his praise, preferring to encourage rather than berate, but Emeline can always tell when he’s truly impressed with her.

“May I see him?” She relinquishes her newly-restored pet a bit reluctantly. “Yes, excellent. Not a squirrel this time.”

She blushes. “They look the same, when they’re spirits!”

Dorian tickles Champignon under the chin and the nug squeaks happily. “Tell that to the poor thing when it tried to climb the table. You must have scared it half past death.”

“You are not so funny as you think, Monsieur Pavus.” She goes to Champignon’s nest to make sure his food and water bowls are full.

Dorian follows her, grinning. “Have I offended, mademoiselle? Perhaps I shall remove my noxious self from your presence. Leave you to your chores in peace.”

“Straining embrium extract takes four hands, as you well know.”

“You’re a necromancer, aren’t you? Magic up a corpse or two to help!”

She takes Champignon from Dorian and replaces him with a bowl and an armful of cheesecloth. “Go to Pavus, they told me. He’s a good teacher, they said. I shall tell everyone that you’re losing your hair if you don’t put your gloves on and help me now!”

“Mercy!” Dorian laughs. “I submit.”

He ties on his apron and joins Emeline at the sink. “Shall we review the life of Adralla while we work, and the litany as well? I’ve always thought embrium just the right sort of scent for a morning of memorization and thwarting blood mages.”

She rolls her eyes and summons a whisp for light. “Just try not to drop any glass this time. I have much more experience healing nugs than humans.”

“And may you always.” He wraps an arm briefly around her shoulder and tugs her close. “You’re doing well, have I told you that?”

“I won’t stop you from saying it again.” She smirks at him, and he’s already smiling back.

“As long as you know that,” he says, and nods firmly. “Now, can you tell me why the Litany of Adralla is typically recited by rote and rarely written down?”


End file.
